Monday, March 24, 2014

Sharing a Family Residency Between Two Artist-Parents

a shared studio table at a previous residency

Residency Report is an ongoing series of posts from artists who've undertaken creative
residencies with their families. Find out about programs that support
artists with kids, and see how other artist-parents balance the
residency experience. Christa Donner shares the experience of a dual residency with her husband, accompanied by their young daughter, at Can Serrat in Spain.

My husband Andrew and I are both working artists. Participating in residency programs is something that has been important in each of our practices, and though our processes are quite different, we gain a lot from the focused conversation and occasional collaboration that happens when we think and make together. Needless to say, that situation got more complicated once we became parents. We set about researching international programs that would allow the three of us to live and work together at the same time, and finally found one that seemed a good fit for our needs. It's not easy to find a residency where you're both invited at the same time, which may mean opting for a fee-based program and seeking outside funding. For a range of residencies that support artists raising kids, visit the CR Resources page.

The special challenge of a two-parent residency, as in everyday life, is how to productively divide up family time versus studio time... and while you’re at it remember to connect as a functioning couple. Having recently returned from just such an endeavor, I humbly share the following thoughts and some useful tips:

Jet Lag? Arrive Early if You Can.
Since we were spending a month abroad, the last thing we wanted was to spend our first week of residency time adjusting to the seven-hour time change with a toddler... especially since we’d be in close quarters with other artists. Instead we flew across the ocean several days early to acclimate to the new situation.

jet lag is easier with someone else's toys

If you happen to have a friend with extra space where you're going, consider a relaxed visit before the residency starts. We didn't know anyone there, but rented a lovely and inexpensive apartment from a family who happened to have a similarly-aged child (bonus: cool toys) and adjusted to the dazed afternoons and midnight wakeup calls that way. Having a kitchen takes a lot of the stress out of mealtimes in a new place, and is so much cheaper than living out of hotels and restaurants. If you’ll be traveling near any major city, there are plenty of apartment rental sites out there: try Air BnB and filter your search for “kid friendly” options, or Children-Friendly Vacation Rentals. This experience also prompted us to consider possibilities for home + studio swapping with artist families in other cities, in lieu of a formal residency structure.

Expect to Reconfigure
Needless to say, if you can find and afford local childcare or an
age-appropriate program for your kids during a residency, absolutely do.
That wasn't an option for us this time around, but we still found ways
to make it work.

Before leaving for the residency, we planned to divide up our day as we often do at home: one of us would get up early with our daughter in the morning and watch her til noon, then the other would take over after her post-lunch nap. Two four-hour blocks seemed pretty straightforward. Done.

Of course that’s not how it worked out: our early-riser daughter miraculously started waking up two hours later in the day and taking much longer naps, which meant some serious reconfiguring to keep things fair. And though I often take the morning shift at home, I worked much better in the afternoons overseas. We wound up taking turns on alternate days, which worked out fine most of the time. Whatever your plan, sit down again to discuss it after the first week there and adjust as needed.

All Together Now

a Barcelona playground surrounded by cafes

For the first week of the residency, as soon as our daughter went to bed my partner and I grabbed our laptops to catch up on email and news. After that our only interaction was the occasional grunt of annoyance at something on the screen. Of course this happens at home, but the urgency to squeeze in productive studio time can make a shared residency tough on relationships. Since we rarely overlapped except for mealtimes, it wasn’t long before we felt completely disconnected and totally irritated with each other.

One of the tradeoffs of doing a residency with your family along is that, well, you need to make some time to be a family. In our particular situation, we decided to adjust our schedules and computer time: we fit in what we could during the day, and in the evening, office hours were over. Just turning off our separate screens of distraction worked wonders. Weekends, which we’d been treating as just more work days, we re-designated for family time. This helped all of us connect beyond
stressful meals or bedtime battles, and the break was important for our
creative work, too.

Leave the Toys at Home (…most of them anyway)
Packing for any long trip with a small child gets heavy really fast. For the sake of our backs and our baggage, we brought very few books and toys. This might seem obvious, but bringing less stuff was great for all of us, and made for some natural extensions from family time into creative practice:

Playground = studio: Every town we were in, no matter how tiny or large, offered

homemade toys inspire new forms in the studio

interesting public playspaces that made me rethink our relationships to playgrounds. Sometimes they feature adult exercise equipment, too. These proved to be a great place to consider the body, geology and biology, language and motion.

Investigate: Like parenting, exploring a new place always reminds me to see, smell, taste, touch and listen with curiosity and attention. Our daughter initiated collections of pebbles and other small found things, and enthusiastically contributed to field recordings of local sounds. Whether you’re in the city or the countryside, you'll spend a lot of
time just getting to know the new environment. This tends to feed your
practice even while you're caring for your child, in fact especially so:
they'll always notice things you won't on your own.

Make It Up: With less toys, residencies get more creative for kids too. When the weather kept us indoors we followed the example of some fellow artist-friends and made our own awesome little toys out of boxes and food packaging. A bunch of little blue tiles lying around turned out to be perfect for toddler stacking and building. We used our imaginations more. Great fun and less waste. These forms have resurfaced at home and in the studio.

Reach Out
If you’re part of a program with other artists it can be all too easy to retreat into a comfortable family island within the larger community… but then you’ll miss out on the studio dialogue, cultural

impromptu concert with artists in the residency kitchen

insights, networking opportunities and
friendships that make multi-artist residencies worth doing. Getting to
know your colleagues also helps lower the stress level when your kid
throws a tantrum at dinner, or when you need to ask for some quiet at
bedtime. If you share meals and/or studios in a common space, some of
this may happen organically. We sometimes took turns going on field
trips with other residents, giving each of us the chance to make
friends, hike, and explore the area on a level we just couldn’t pull off
with the whole family along.

Working together in the same residency program isn't for everyone, but was worthwhile for us. Some parents opt to take turns doing residencies instead, while others wait it out until the kids are much older. Have you ever done a residency with your family? What other strategies or tips would you recommend? Share your comments below ... and get in touch with Cultural ReProducers if you'd like to contribute a Residency Report of your own.

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Cultural ReProducers are an evolving group of active cultural workers who are also parents. This site is for anyone interested in making the art world a more inclusive and interesting place by supporting arts professionals raising kids.